Thursday, October 23

At Home With The Fuzz

Is there anything better than a mid-week tour around the Clare, surely Australia’s prettiest wine region? Even better when you get to spend a few minutes holding up the bar at Hop & Vine, a delightful shabby chic shrine to craft beer and boutique SA wines in the main street of Auburn. Kym Deckart, brand ambassador for Clare Valley Brewing Co, introduced me the brewery’s new mid-strength offering called The Fuzz, a crisp coppery drop created specially for the Queensland market. “It’s just hit the ground in Queensland and the signs are promising,” Kym says. “It’s a good tasting beer.” This new offering joins the brewery’s established portfolio of ales and ciders, including King Kong Stout, Bulls Eye APA, Monkey’s Uncle Red Ale and Miss Molly Malone Grape Cider. Kym tells me the initial 15,000 litres of Mills Molly (released in October 2013) sold out in four weeks. “We’ve just enjoyed really good times,” he says modestly. Already a fan of the ballsy King Kong I was keen to taste the limited release Bring Out The Gimp—a wicked mocha stout. Now that’s what I call a beer. Clare Valley Brewing Co is great South Australian success story. Since the release of its first beer in August 2013 the company has established a strong niche in the domestic market and is already making forays into the eastern states. Its cellar door, Hop & Vine is a really cool place to hang out – apart from the full range of CVBC beers it also showcases some of Clare’s more boutique wines, including Good Catholic Girl and Jeanneret Wines. Visitors will enjoy the eccentric mix of Victorian furniture, industrial design and theatrical props, such as the painted bulls horns and chandeliers. But Hop & Vine is not the only good news story. Just up the road the highly respected Pikes winery is putting the finishing touches to a new state-of-the-art brewery, which should be coming on line in early 2015. There are similar expansion plans at Knappstein winery, where brewer Melissa Fettke is looking towards a bright future for regional players like themselves. “The craft beer world is an exceedingly exciting place to be,” she says. For more visit: http://clarevalleybrewing.com.au

About Me

Mark Chipperfield is a British-born journalist who now lives in Sydney, Australia. A former foreign correspondent and news reporter, Mark writes mostly about travel, food, wine, craft beer and other pleasant things. His work appears in The Daily Telegraph (UK), Qantas magazine, Voyeur, Departures magazine, The Lead, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.